Free The Atlantis Legacy - A01-A02 by Thomas Greanias

down another long corridor. Conrad could hear a low hum beneath the music as they walked. And every now and then, a shudder seemed to pass through the entire base like a train had just rumbled by.
    “We’ve got a command center, biodome, mobile servicing center, an astrophysics lab, an observatory, and modules for materials processing, remote sensing, and medical research,” Yeats said.
    “You forgot the drill rig,” Conrad said. “That would explain the shaking.”
    Yeats pretended he hadn’t heard him and pointed in the opposite direction. “The brig is that way.”
    This whole base is a brig, thought Conrad as he looked down a tunnel toward a sealed-off air lock. “Where is anybody going to go that you need to lock him up?”
    “The harsh conditions here are known to send men over the edge,” Yeats said.
    Conrad looked at his father. “Is that what happened to you?”
    Yeats stopped and turned around abruptly in front of a door marked AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. As if anybody else was around to violate security procedures.
    “Follow me through this door, son,” said Yeats, his hand resting on the release bar, “and you just might go over the edge yourself.”
     
    Standing on a platform inside the cavernous laboratory was a pyramid about ten feet tall. A solid piece of rock with an almost reddish glow, it was marked by four grooves or rings around its sides. The rings began halfway up the slopes and grew closer together toward the top.
    Conrad let out a low whistle.
    “Pentagon satellites picked up a dark anomaly beneath the ice shortly after the last big quake some weeks ago,” Yeats said. “We put a survey team on the ground, but they couldn’t pick up anything solid. The anomaly appeared to be invisible to radio-echo surveys. That’s when we started drilling. We hit the stone a mile beneath the ice cap. Clearly it’s not a natural rock formation.”
    No it wasn’t, Conrad thought with growing excitement as he studied the stone. The U.S. State Department’s official position was that no human had set foot on Antarctica before the nineteenth century. Yet this rock was at least as old as the ice that covered it—twelve thousand years. That strongly suggested the remains of a civilization twice as old as Sumer, the oldest known on Earth.
    Conrad ran his hand across the smooth face of the stone and inserted a finger into one of the strange grooves. This find could be it, he thought, nearly trembling now, the first evidence of the Mother Culture he had been seeking his entire life.
    “So where’s the rest of it?” he asked.
    Yeats seemed to be holding back. “Rest of what?”
    “The pyramid,” Conrad said. “This is a benben stone.”
    “Benben?”
    Now Yeats was just playing dumb, clearly eager to see if his investment in him was worth the cost. Conrad didn’t mind singing for his supper, but he wasn’t going to settle for crumbs.
    “An ancient Egyptian symbol of the bennu bird—the phoenix,” Conrad said. “It represents rebirth and immortality. It’s the capstone or pyramidion placed on top of a pyramid.”
    “So you’ve seen it before?”
    “No,” Conrad said. “They’re missing from all the great pyramids of the world. We know them mostly through ancient texts. They were replicas of the long-lost original benben stone, which was said to have fallen from heaven.”
    “Like a meteorite,” finished Yeats, staring at the rock.
    Conrad nodded. “But a benben this size means the pyramid beneath it would have to be enormous.”
    “A mile high and almost two miles wide.”
    Conrad stared at Yeats. “That’s more than ten times the size of the Great Pyramid in Giza.”
    “Eleven point one times exactly,” said Yeats. So his father had indeed done his homework. “Bigger than the Pentagon. And more advanced. Its exterior is smoother than a stealth bomber, which may explain why it’s been invisible to radio-echo surveys. These grooves on this capstone are P4’s only